X rolls out faster web app, claiming profiles load in seconds
X is gradually releasing a new version of its web app for signed-in users, with company figures showing a sharp drop in profile load times.
X is rolling out a new version of its web app that the company says is dramatically faster than the one it replaces. The update is arriving gradually, one country at a time, and so far it is limited to users who are signed in to their accounts. Users who are not logged in are not yet part of the change, and the company has not said when that will change.
The performance claims were laid out in a blog post written by principal engineer Yagiz Nizipli. In the example he cited, loading a slow connection profile took roughly 22 seconds in the old app. In the new version, the first post appears in about 2.7 seconds. The figures are company-reported and have not been independently verified. The conditions under which the benchmark was run, beyond that single example, were not made clear, so it is difficult to know how typical the improvement would be for an average user on an average connection.
The speed gains are tied to a change in how X's infrastructure is organized. According to the post, three servers that previously handled several jobs have been replaced by a single server. The older servers served ordinary users, search crawlers and link previews, the small preview cards that appear when a link is shared. Consolidating that work onto one system is the core of the architectural change the company describes. Nizipli's post goes further into the technical details of how the new architecture was built, though the material available for this report covers the outline rather than every design decision.
The rollout is also notable for what it leaves unsettled. X has not provided a full timeline for when the update will reach every market, and it has not published a list of the countries that will receive it first. That leaves users in most regions without a clear sense of when they can expect the change, and it leaves outside observers without a way to compare performance across different places and network conditions.
There is also the question of what happens to the jobs the older servers used to handle. Search crawlers and link previews depend on the same infrastructure that serves regular users, and the company's account does not explain in detail how the consolidated setup covers those functions. Until a wider rollout and independent testing are available, the speed improvements remain the company's own account of its product, and the broader effect on reliability and features will only become clear as more people use the new version.
Source: theverge.com
8
